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Street art: Virtual museum aims to catalogue public art around the world

Big Art Mob, a virtual online museum, will be an evolving, navigable, crowdsourced map of the world’s public art.

The giant thimble resting on a stack of buttons on the northwest corner of Richmond St. and Spadina Ave. represents one example of the street art that a crowd-sourced public-art mapping website hopes to capture online. But graffiti, paste-ups and anything people create with the intention of making art are also fair game. (DAVID COOPER / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Kate AllenStaff Reporter

Thu., Aug. 30, 2012

At a street corner along Queen St. W. some months ago, a not-altogether-flattering picture of Mayor Rob Ford was pasted up over the broken-down signage of an auto body shop. Within days, it disappeared.

As public art goes, the first was illegal and short-lived; the second cost roughly $8 million and will endure for decades. For Big Art Mob, a London, U.K.-based startup, it’s all fodder for an ambitious online project that launches Friday: “a huge sprawling global museum of public art,” in the words of founder Alfie Dennen.

Users are invited to upload images of anything they think counts as “public art” — from the hastiest graffiti tag to the grandest baroque fountain — and tag each with a location, creating a navigable, crowdsourced map.

The site was in beta-testing for most of August, with only the first 500 users allowed to sign up and try it. Yet all of Kelowna, B.C., has already been mapped, while Toronto has a measly nine posts. Dennen is putting out “a klaxon call to residents (of Toronto) to map their city.”

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Because Big Art Mob grew out of an earlier U.K.-based public art project, London and other British cities are well covered. Users in Brazil and Malaysia have also contributed posts in recent weeks. A smartphone app is “nearly there,” and should be available soon.

Dennen sees Big Art Mob as the “flipside” of the Art Project, a Google venture that has digitized 30,000 works of art in 151 museums worldwide. Big Art Mob, on the other hand, will capture art that exists outside of institutions, whether sanctioned by them or not.

“There’s this slow but absolutely inevitable lead into a digitized Earth, not to sound crazy. But everything will have some form of digital element to it,” he says. While a digitized museum of public art is by no means futuristic-sounding in 2012, Dennen says none has been attempted on this scale.

The project’s definition of public art is broad: “Any work in public view created by a person or a group whose aim was to create a work that they believe to be art, irrespective of genre or style,” says Dennen. Given that some graffiti murals are painted and repainted multiple times in the course of just a few months, it’s possible that the same wall could be the site of many user-uploaded posts over time. Officially recognized works are welcome too, such as Coupland’s canoe and other park elements, or even notable architecture.

Paolo Dalla Rosa, owner of Don’t Tell Mama gallery on Ossington St., has curated several shows of graffiti and street artists. He thinks they would love the idea — both because it validates their medium and because it captures works that are often later scrubbed off.

“Some of these guys take it as a compliment when their stuff has been removed. They feel like they’re getting to people. But there are some who take it personally,” says Dalla Rosa.

While Big Art Mob is a global project, it hinges on local participation, Dennen says. “It’s only going to work if it’s city by city — and if it’s relevant to that city.”

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